So you want a Change Management Process eh?
Change Management is a huge topic and could encompass a few books worth of content, even just covering Salesforce Change Management. The scope is far too much for a single blog post. Suffice to say I have no intention of trying to tackle that topic in this post so you can safely continue reading knowing that there will indeed be an end.
What I did want to call out in this post is one significant reason why a Salesforce Change Management Process is needed and why you as the Salesforce Administrator should be using one.
Why you need a Salesforce Change Management Process
Have you ever heard the phrase "What gets measured gets done"? Its true.
If you aren't measuring yourself then who is?
Ask yourself how you are managing Salesforce changes now. Through Email requests? Sticky Notes? Colleagues walking up to your desk or casually mentioning user requirements to you in the bathroom?
If you aren't tracking and measuring your changes within Salesforce then they aren't really happening. Tracking them in a formal way allows you to measure how much time you are spending making these changes, what changes are being made, who requested them, who approved them, etc. Additionally, there is an often overlooked measure of change management that can be tracked in Salesforce which is the net affect of the change itself. Being able to quantify a changes value in perpetuity goes a long way in measuring your impact and value to an organization.
Here's an example:
Durham Doughnuts Sales Staff spend an average of 10 seconds on each opportunity finding and selecting the correct Pricebook. The Sales Staff consists of 5 Sales Reps and each generates an average of 6 Opportunities a day. The Pricebook is defined by the Type of customer on the Account so often times the Sales Rep has to navigate to the Account to verify the Account Type.
Our System Administrator logs the entry in her Salesforce Change Management system and proceeds to use the Process Builder to default select the correct Pricebook for each Opportunity. This change effectively saves an average of 5 minutes (10 Sec * 6 Opps * 5 Reps) per day or about 21.66 working hours per year (260 working days * 5 Min).
This is a simple example but it does show how a simple change can go a long way. Now, imagine you never tracked this change or its effectiveness and I asked you what impact you made for your organization last year. If you didn't track the change and measured its effectiveness your answer better be zero, otherwise I'm going to ask you to prove it.
